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Because the world lacks properly hooptie-ized scale-model cars

Some details of the interior of my one attempt to do an accurate hooptie car model

June 13, 2016

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I have always been a fan of survivor cars -- the hoopties that keep getting the job done. Around 25 years ago, your typical two-hundred-buck hooptie (at least in California, where I lived at the time) was a full-sized Detroit car from the 1965-1980 period. I daily-drove such a car during that period, and so I felt compelled to build a 1/25-scale model kit of a similar car, in similarly rough condition.

This kit took me weeks to build in 1991, and has lived on a dozen workplace desks since that time. Photo by Murilee Martin

I'm not a very skilled modelmaker, and I made the mistake of starting my ambitious build with a crappy AMT 1970 Impala kit (because I couldn't find a 1965 Impala kit in those pre-internet days). Still, I became obsessed with making a car model that wasn't "weathered" in the sense of a romantic '55 Chevy sitting behind the barn, but instead a real-world hooptie that one might see driving the streets of the East Bay in the early 1990s.

I wrote about this kit a decade or so back, but the period-accurate hooptie details needed a more detailed look. The spare tire and 5-gallon round gas can (remember those?) in the back seat. The beer cans and tools on the floor. The incorrect-colored steering wheel. Sadly, the original pliers-as-window-crank-handle fell off and disappeared at some point prior to the end of the 20th century.